This is a great honor for me, because I
had, just a moment ago, the opportunity to talk with some
members of the Class of 2000 and to remember how exciting law
school is. It is a great privilege. I hope to do justice to
the confidence that you exhibit in awarding me this honorary
degree.

And to the platform guests, to Chief Judge Kay
(phonetic), to the faculty, but especially to the students,
it's wonderful to be here today, because it was 40 years ago
this month that I went to law school. I was scared. I
wondered what I had gotten myself into. In those days, they
said, "Look to the right of you, look to the left of you. One
of you won't be here next year." (Laughter.)

The dean asked us what the 16 women out of the class of
540 were going to do with their law school education. I did
have the chance to tell him before he died what I had done.
But Dean Griswold (phonetic) was very special. And to the dean
and to the faculty, just know how you have touched the lives
of students and how you will touch the lives of students for
the future -- not just here at Pace, but as Dean Griswold did
on so many occasions when he would check with me to make sure
that things were going well, long before I ever thought that I
would come to Washington. I never dreamed that I would have
the 40 years experience that I have had in the law, that it
would be such a wonderful profession, a profession that could
help shape America. Never did I dream that I would have
the extraordinary opportunity to try to use the law the right
way to make America safer, freer, and healthier.To the
students, I urge on you one piece
of advice that I give respectfully.

Don't ever do anything
you don't enjoy doing.

The law is too
wonderful, and life is too short, and there are too many
things to do to do things that you don't
want to do.

But then figure out how you use the law, and
figure out how you, in some small
measure or in large measure, can contribute to public service.

What can you do, either part-time or full-time, to make a difference
with the law?

As you do it, think of the
law in four ways: the lawyer as the advocate and as the
defender; the lawyer as the problem
solver and the peacemaker.

Traditionally, the lawyer has been
thought more often as the
deal-maker or the advocate or defender, and I take not a thing
away from those functions.

For as long as I live I will remember a case in which I
was asked by the Governor of
Florida to reinvestigate the case of a man who had been
prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced to
death for the poisoning death of his seven children, 22 years
before. He had spent 21 years in
prison for a crime he claimed he did not commit.

The Supreme Court had set aside the death penalty in
1972,but he had been in prison for
all that time.

I watched him go free because of what we had
done in terms of exposing the lack
of evidence sufficient to convict him.

For as long as I live,
I will remember that man walking out
of that courthouse free for the first time in 22 years.

And
never has the law meant what it did to
me that afternoon.

But then there have been other moments
where the law has been, for me, a
problem solver.

And I watched --after I had come down an old dirt road in
South Carolina, passed an old
oak tree that stood where a church had burnt out; the
president of the United States and I came to
dedicate a new church to replace the one razed by arson --
as we came down from the platform,
a lady burst through the rope line and said, "Janet, how are
you?

I haven't seen you since
hurricane Andrew, and Drew (phonetic) drove me up here. You
got me child support in Miami,
and I've always been grateful.

And these are the two children
you got child support for."

(Laughter.)And two fine young men greeted me, and they made
you realize that all the functions of the law are important.

But I would like to talk to you about the problem solver
and the peacemaker, because I don't think enough attention is
given by any of us to solving people's problems in a real way
and in a permanent way.Let me give you an example of what I'm
talking about. When we deal with an angry young man who has
an assault and battery charge and is charged with possession
of drugs, the police officer too often thinks he's won the
victory by making the arrest and presenting a strong case to
the prosecutor only to ignore the impact on the siblings of
the young man who rely on the young man for financial support
and become adrift and unsupervised. The prosecutor too often
thinks that she's won a victory when she gets that person
convicted only to ignore the fact that there are not enough
prison cells to house him or anybody else through the length
of time the judges are sentencing them and that there are not
enough treatment programs to do something about the problem
that got him it into the jail in the first place.

The public defender thinks he's won the case when he gets
his client off on a motion to dismiss, oftentimes watching as
he walks out of the courtroom in the grip of an addiction to
crack that is far more of a prison than the prison he has
avoided. The judge too often thinks that he's done his job
well if he presides over a fair trial and ensures the law was
properly applied to the facts of the case only to miss the
bigger picture that the community is the context for the
crime. Why not really solve the problem? Why don't police and
prosecutors and public defenders and judges and all those
associated with a community solve the problem so we don't have
to see people recycled through the system again and again?

Chief Judge Kay, who is here today, who I think is
probably the best problem solver I know and the best example
of a public servant that I know, is a wonderful proponent of
common-sense problem-solving approaches to justice, and she
recently delivered some very wise words. She said, "We're
recycling the same people through the system, and things get
worse. We know from experience that a drug possession or an
assault today could be something considerably worse tomorrow."
She's right.

And a tribal leader stood in Austin Hall (phonetic) at
Harvard Law School, and pointed his finger at me and said,
"You all in the common law tradition just call it one way or
the other -- guilt or innocence, black or white. You don't
deal with the gray areas of human existence. You don't try to
solve the problem that caused the crime in the first place."
We can learn much from our Native American friends. But we
are learning. In the last eight years, crime has gone down to
historic lows eight years in a row. I don't claim credit for
it, but I think what's happened is that America has learned
how to approach the problem of crime from a problem-solving
perspective, and I see it, that function, in action across
American.

Let me give you what I think are the ingredients of good
problem solving on the part of lawyers, judges, and others who
participate in the criminal justice system or, indeed, in our
justice system. First of all, and one ingredient that people
too often don't put into the mix, listen to the people who are
your clients, listen to the people who are your constituency,
listen to the people whom you serve, and listen with a
listening ear. They have so much to tell you. And you say,
"Why should I listen to them? I went to law school. I have a
degree in such and such. I know best." There is, on the wall
of the justice building, on the 9th Street side, an
inscription that says, "The common law is the will of mankind
issuing from the life of the people, framed through mutual
confidences, and sanctioned by the light of reason." Unless
the people feel that they have an investment and an
involvement in the law, the law will not, in the long range
and the long run, work. People have to be involved. That old
lady has to feel safe enough to walk out from behind the bar
doors of her apartment down to the community center to give
the police officer a few pieces of wise words and a piece of
her mind. She's got to be involved in the
community for her to believe in the law and in justice in
America.

If people are left out, they
become angry, they become alienated, and they do not serve to
be part of democracy.

One of the great experiences that I have had as attorney
general is to welcome ministers
of justice, prime ministers, and other leaders from emerging
democracies to the justice building.

They come with stars in their eyes.

They're so excited.

They
want to know how to build institutions.

They want to know how to engage in the
administration of justice.

And you realize
that democracy and, most particularly, the judicial branch of
our democracies around the world, is a very fragile, very
precious institution and institutions. We too often take it
for granted.

When you watch these people trying to build a judiciary, you
stand in awe of our judiciary, both
federal and state, but it requires a constant vigilance. It
requires that judiciary and that
government deal with the real world.

The old lady wants to
get out and in her community, and
she wants to be involved.

We've got to listen to her and make
her community safe enough to do
it, but we've got to listen to her to find out how to make the
community safe enough to do it.

For
the lady who has two children who lives in an apartment where
the toilet from above is falling
into the kitchen below and nobody will do anything to change
it and she can't afford to go to the
court or go to a lawyer, we've got to solve her problem in a
system that permits the solution of
problems so that she will have confidence in her government,
in her courts, and believe in her
democracy.

The second ingredient is that it must be comprehensive.
The criminal justice system, for
example, is not prevention and it's not punishment, solely, on
either side.

It is both.

It is not
intervention alone or aftercare alone.

It is both.

It is
fighting crime from zero to three when a child is born and
child learns what conscience, punishment, and reward mean.

It
is fighting
crime by developing after-school programs that provide for
mentoring and supervision of our
children.

It is educational system that puts teachers first,
rather than football players, and starts
doing something about salaries for teachers that attracts the
very best into teaching our children
from the beginning.

Secondly, let's just consider domestic violence.

We can
approach it from the point of
view of processing a case through the courts.

With your
marvelous clinic here, you're doing so
much to look beyond that, to look beyond the number of cases
processed.

We have got to start
early.

And pediatricians' offices, doctors' offices, should
have material on domestic violence --
on where to go, what to do if you're a victim of domestic
violence.

Doctors -- every doctor should
be trained in how you identify it early on and make appropriate
referrals. We have got to look at
how we deal with it in particular communities.

Reaching out to
immigrants who say, "But it's a fact of life in my world, and
it is accepted." It is not accepted, and we have to start
very early, because if our children observe it and we do
nothing about it and fail to intervene in their lives, they're
going to come to accept violence as a way of life for the rest
of their life. It must be comprehensive. We must consider all
parts of the problem and how they interact rather than focusing
the narrow -- in the narrow perspective on just one isolated
part.

The third ingredient for good problem solving is
collaboration. The schools of higher education of this nation
have too often sent us down little pig trails -- the little
pig trail of the law, the little pig trail of public health,
the little pig trail of medicine. If yo can tell me that
lawyers can solve all the problems by themselves, I'll listen,
but you're going to have to convince me. We have got to form
new alliances -- of lawyers and public-health specialists, of
social workers and teachers, of police officers and
businessmen, of preachers and pastors and poets -- to make a
difference and to teach America how to solve problems as a
collective whole. We can do so much if we do it together.

Now, problem solving must also be driven by the fourth
ingredient, a very, very valuable ingredient for lawyers:
facts and information. The criminal justice system for too
long reacted just to a lead. A police officer would get a tip
from a confidential informant that would lead him on an
interesting path, and he would end up with the Number 10 drug
organization down from the big organization, Number 1. With
computers and databases, we now have the opportunity to collect
information as we never have before, to understand patterns and
trends, and we can make such a difference if we use that
information the right way. The fact that problem solvers are
collaborative, information driven, and comprehensive allows
problem solvers to be strategic, and it means we can try to
effect a real-world solution. Rather than saying that Janet
Reno, as state attorney in Miami, processed 30,000 cases, we
can say Janet Reno did this that reduced crime by so much. But
it shouldn't be one person's credit. It should be a community
and a nation's credit. And we can achieve this if we start
believing in our capacity to make a difference.

Finally, Dean, there's another ingredient to problem
solving, an ingredient that lawyers too often don't have -- two
ingredients. One, how to finance things in a cost-effective
manner and, two, how to manage things in a sensitive and
informed manner. Now, first of all in problem solving, I want
to suggest to you that money is not always the answer, and the
lack of money is not always an excuse. It is amazing what you
can do if you've got your money hat on, have the inventory of
resources in the community assessed, and you figure out what
you can do by eliminating duplication, by providing early
intervention so you save people revolving back through the
system again and again, what you can do if you work with people
to bring communities together as a glue and bring resources
together that never existed before.

I have urged the Dean to establish a course at Pace in
appropriations law because most lawyers don't know anything
about the appropriations process, and that's where most of the
work of the legislature and the congress gets done. You've got
to understand that if you're going to be a good problem solver.
You've got to understand how you're going to make a lawsuit
real. How many of you have watched somebody sue, get a
judgment, and have that judgment be absolutely worthless?
That's not solving a problem. You sue a housing authority and
you want them to fix up the housing, and they turn to you say,
"But we don't have any money." The good lawyer's going to
say, "Your Honor, they have money by doing this, this, this,
and this. And if they make an investment, they can lower their
vacancy rate, they can put more money into infrastructure
improvement, they can build a better client base, they can
develop better customer-friendly services, and they can begin
to be self-sufficient again." But that's going to take
management skills. And, as I said, what lawyers are very good
at -- I've discovered since I've operated under their
regulations and their rules -- is that they're very good at
providing regulations that affect managers. And then you put a
lawyer in the management position, and they say, "How did we
get this? What did we do with this?" We've got to learn how
to be managers if we're going to be good problem solvers.

But let me be clear, problem solving does not mean we
abandon the law as we know it. We must always work to improve
and enforce the rule of law, but the rule of law, and law and
its institutions and its practitioners, cannot function
isolated from the everyday experience of the people. The
lawyer must serve the people and solve their problems rather
than just winning cases. The lawyers must be problem solvers
and peacemakers. We must use the law the right way to look at
the whole picture of a human life in community and make
reasoned judgments on how to proceed. That leads me to one of
the best arenas for problem solving that exists now, and that
is the courts of this country. One of the people that has been
most adept at using the courts and showing this nation what
courts can do is Chief Judge Kay and her colleagues. Her
colleagues are powerful forces behind her, and you present a
tremendous team.

All you have to do is go to the Midtown Community Court in
Manhattan. It is a remarkable story. You walk out of there
with such spirit, with a greater faith in human beings and
their capacity to recover and their capacity to contribute if
given only half a chance. It takes an aggressive
problem-solving approach to neighborhood issues and
neighborhood crime. The court draws upon neighborhood
resources and partners to develop a broad menu of constructive
responses to low-level crime: painting over graffitti,
sweeping the streets, stuffing envelopes for local nonprofits
in the neighborhood they have harmed.

In addition, the court provides a variety of social
services on site. All of this is such common sense, and it is
working. The Redhook Justice Center (phonetic) is taking a
comprehensive approach to crime delinquency, family violence,
and housing problems, another project of the New York courts --
again, an exciting project, one that can make a difference.
Now, some of you will say, "But what can I, as one person, do?"
We had a problem in Dade County in 1988. We had these large
number of offenders charged with possession of a small amount
of cocaine -- first offenders. And all that they were getting
was credit time served. No treatment, no prison, no jail, just
-- you were there, you got booked, and you're off on your own.
And they were rotating happily through the system, getting
worse as they went. We developed a drug court that was small
enough in caseload, had resources sufficient to begin to deal
with the people's problems. We control the caseload. We
required testing. We operated on a carrot-and-stick approach
that said, "Work with us. We'll get you into job training,
placement, we will support you as you leave the system.

But if you fail and come in and test positive, you're
going to face a more serious sanction every step of the way."
But we did more than that. We had it evaluated to see if it
was really working. Was it making a difference? And it was.
Recidivism was significantly reduced. What do we do? Suddenly
we found that people were writing about it, and people were
coming to visit to understand how the drug court worked. There
are now 508 drug courts in the country. And I went back for
the tenth anniversary in Miami. From the five people who had
originally founded the first drug court, there were now over a
thousand in the room. Each one of you can solve problems and
make a difference, but the whole concept has created something
that is important for this nation. The courts of this nation have been totally overwhelmed
in the last 30 years. As institutions of the family, the
neighborhood, and the schools failed, this court saw an
onslaught of cases. Without resources, without sufficient
judiciary to manage these cases, the credibility of the courts
was eroded. But when you watch something like the drug court,
when you watch the new and innovative solutions, Redhook and
otherwise, you see what can be done by a judiciary to give
people an acceptance in the system, to give people access to
the system, most of all, ladies and gentlemen, to enable people
to believe in the system. You have no idea what it's like when
somebody walks out of the courthouse with a problem solved.
They think, "It's almost a miracle. How did it work out? How
did I do that?" Compared to the person who often walked out
just frustrated, angry, and upset at a court that did not know
their name, did not know their background, and treated them
like a number. A man stopped me once and said, "Thank you fo
arresting me."I said, "Sir, I didn't arrest you." "Yeah, that's
right," said he, "but you got into drug treatment, and you
gave me a chance. I had lost my family. I had lost my job. I
had hit rock bottom. You gave me a chance. I've had my job
back for two years. I have my family back. I've been drug-free
for two years. Thank you." Those are the things that lawyers
and judges who love the law and love problem solving in the
law will always remember. But there is more to be doing.

Let's look at what the drug court track record is. More
than 210,000 individuals have enrolled in drug court in this
nation. More than 22 states have enacted legislation. More
than 57,000 people have graduated from drug courts. More than
a thousand babies have been born drug-free to drug-court
participants who otherwise would have been born to substance
abuse. More than 3,500 parents have been able to regain
custody of their children as a result of their drug-court
participation. More than 4,500 parents have become current in
child support payments as a result of drug-court participation.
These are real results, not just cases processed through the
system, but lives that have a chance to make a difference in
the world.

The most critical person in the whole problem solving
equation is, I think, the judge. And you should think about
how you train judges. I don't know whether you train them. I
don't know whether it's possible because sometimes the person
just knows how to do it, but a great judge is an extraordinary
person -- the one who understands substance abuse enough,
understands mental illness, appreciates the human spirit, and
knows when to give a person a pat on the back and when to give
them a figurative kick to get them moving again.

It is a delicate balance, but I think we can teach
people, more than we have, how to be great judges. And I think
if we provide the judge with the resources to make appropriate
referrals, if we give them caseloads that will permit them to
listen to people, if we give them the information and databases
necessary to understand their community and understand the
trends, we can make such an extraordinary difference.

For eight years now, I have had the chance to cross-cross
this nation and to see lawyers in action, to see judges in
action. Ladies and gentlemen, never have I been so proud to be
a lawyer as after these eight years. The law is a wonderful
institution. Justice is something that is mighty and marvelous
and too often not within our reach. None of these efforts will
work unless we realize and understand a new day in America in
which everyone has access to justice. Even the smallest and
the lowest who cannot afford justice must have access of this
democracy is to reach its full potential. All America must
feel that they have a chance, if they've messed up, to start
off on a new, fresh foot. We have an obligation to the some
500,000 people who will come out of prisons and jails in
America each year for the next four or five years to give them
a fresh good, positive start; to have their civil rights
restore if they have paid their duty to society by serving
their

time; to a community that gives them support rather than
suspects them of being the recidivists. We can do this by
re-entry courts that provide for supervision of a person coming
out of prison with a judge who is responsive, who understands
what it's like to be returning to the community, who has
resources and structure that will give that re-entry
participant a chance to get off on the right foot under the
carrot-and-stick approach of, "Work with us and we'll work with
you and give you a good supporting foundation as you return;
or, if you choose not to, you can face a more serious sanction
every step of the way."

Let us use it for juvenile delinquency court. The juvenile
court judge is oftentimes a little lower than the angels. To
try to deal with the horrors that some children are born into
in this world, and to give these children a future, to be
mother, father, teacher, community, all at the same -- is one
of the hardest jobs in the world; but if we can train people as
to the resources needed, as to the best programs, as to how to
handle particular aspects of it; if we give them caseloads that
they can manage, we can make the courts a powerful, great, and
wonderful force in this nation. They contribute so much now.
They can be the glue that brings us together. They can be the
sword that protects us. They can be the things we dream of
with justice. About January 20th, I'm going to go home to
Miami, and I'm going to get in my red truck -- (laughter.) --
and I'm going to start out across America to see the places and
to climb the mountains that I didn't get a chance to climb
because I had to go back to Washington and to talk with the
wonderful people of America because I didn't have a chance to
talk to them long enough because I had to catch a plane.

I hope I'll come this way, or wherever you're practicing
law on sitting on the bench. You have done me a great and
single honor today, and I hope I can do you justice. Thank you
very much.